Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith

by D.K.R. Crosswell

Overview

A valued adviser and trusted insider in the highest echelon of U.S. military and political leaders, General Walter Bedell Smith began his public service career of more than forty years at age sixteen, when he joined the Indiana National Guard. His bulldog tenacity earned him an opportunity to work with General George C. Marshall in 1941, playing an essential role in forming the offices of the Combined and Joint Chiefs of Staff; and after his appointment as chief of staff to Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1942, Smith took a central part in planning and orchestrating the major Allied operations of World War II in Europe. Among his many duties, Smith negotiated and signed the surrenders of the Italian and German armed forces on May 7, 1945.

Smith's postwar career included service as the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, and undersecretary of state. Despite his contributions to twentieth-century American military and diplomatic history, the life and work of Smith have largely gone unappreciated. In Beetle: The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith, D. K. R. Crosswell offers the first full-length biography of the general, including insights into his close relationships with Marshall and Eisenhower.

Meticulously researched and long overdue, Beetle sheds new light on Eisenhower as supreme commander and the campaigns in North Africa, Italy, and Europe. Beetle is the fascinating history of a soldier, diplomat, and intelligence chief who played a central role in many decisions that altered mid-twentieth-century American history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813126494
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	11/01/2010
Series:	American Warriors Series
Pages:	1088
Product dimensions:	6.60(w) x 9.30(h) x 2.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

D. K. R. Crosswell is Richard R. Hallock Distinguished University Chair in Military History at Columbus State University, Georgia. He is the author of The Chief of Staff: The Military Career of General Walter Bedell Smith.

Read an Excerpt

BEETLE

The Life of General Walter Bedell Smith

---

By D. K. R. CROSSWELL

The University Press of Kentucky

Copyright © 2010 The University Press of Kentucky
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8131-2649-4

---

Introduction

One pitfall in writing a biography is the risk of becoming too immersed in the topic. You spend so much time with the historic figure you begin to feel like you know the person and those in his or her circle. This project has consumed me—with varying degrees of intensity—since 1982. I first encountered Beetle Smith when acting as Merle Miller's researcher for his biography of Dwight Eisenhower, Ike the Soldier: As They Knew Him. Smith's career as Eisenhower's chief of staff became the subject of my dissertation; then I worked the dissertation into a book, published by Greenwood in 1991. As a first book, it was not without some merit—it received some solid reviews and commendation by Choice—but its publication left me with no sense of closure. Blame it on a callow academic too eager to publish his first book, but I fell victim to the temptation of uncritically accepting received wisdom—in this case, the "good cop" (Eisenhower)-"bad cop" (Smith) school. Basically, I took the easy way out and followed a well-worn path, merely inserting Smith into the story. During my first month as a PhD student at Kansas State, my mentor, Professor Robin Higham, invited D. Clayton James, then a scholar in residence at the Command and General Staff College, to present a talk on his experiences writing the biography of Douglas MacArthur. "Some days I wake up and think MacArthur was the greatest general who ever lived," he recounted. "others, I concluded he was the biggest SoB who ever lived." With Smith, it proved all too easy to accept his reputation as a one-dimensional SOB, because that was precisely the persona he labored so hard to project. But his friend Hastings Ismay knew better, noting that Smith "was never the terrible Beetle in [Harry C.] Butcher's book" My Three Years with Eisenhower, based on the household and headquarters diaries of Eisenhower's naval aide and confidant. The truth is I did not know Smith very well in 1991, and my first book did him an injustice—albeit completely unintended. As it turned out, there were several facets to Beetle Smith. He was much more than advertised, and his boss, Eisenhower, considerably less.

This book's structure is unorthodox. Instead of following a chronological format, I begin with a section on Smith's postwar career serving two presidents: as ambassador to the Soviet Union and director of the Central Intelligence Agency under Truman, and as undersecretary of state and government adviser in the Eisenhower administration. Smith's contributions as ambassador in Moscow when American-Soviet relations entered the deep freeze, as founding father of the CIA, and as number two to John Foster Dulles, especially the parts he played in the Iranian and Guatemalan coups and the Indochina portion of the Geneva conference of 1954, are themselves worthy of serious interest. Essentially, this work is a military biography, and for that reason, I resorted to the device of front-loading Smith's postwar career. Whether this works must be left to the reader's judgment.

Aside from providing an account of Smith's remarkable career and his contributions to the Allied victory in Europe as Eisenhower's chief of staff, this volume has two other objectives. American military biographers tend to shy away from controversial topics; reflecting public tastes, they prefer to cast their subjects in bronze. Political scientists and political historians have engaged in a healthy discourse on Eisenhower and his leadership style virtually since his inaugural, but nothing similar exists in the military history literature. Biographies of Eisenhower still constitute something of a cottage industry. The title of the latest, Michael Korda's Ike: An American Hero, perfectly sums up the popular view: Eisenhower as American Everyman, the poor boy who grew up to be president after first liberating Europe from the scourge of fascism. Even the best of them, Carlo D'este's Eisenhower: A Soldier's Life, portrays Eisenhower warts and all, but it still leaves the reader with the image of Ike as Frank Merriwell, the all-American boy. There is a good reason for this: Eisenhower personified a whole array of cherished American ideals. Another reason is that Eisenhower remains an elusive subject.

Eisenhower's detractors—both during the war and after—portray him as a mere chairman of the Allied corporate board, who, though binding the alliance together and achieving victory in Europe, never wielded decisive leadership. He was prone to maddening bouts of indecision and preferred compromise to affirmative control, and this leadership style left him prey to his fractious and willful senior subordinates. Closing his mind to more ambitious schemes for ending the war, his decisions instead lengthened it. His defenders paint an entirely different canvas. As an American supreme commander of an international coalition, Eisenhower skillfully plotted his course, balancing the need to preserve the support of his political chiefs with the need to buttress Allied public opinion, while selectively employing the formal powers conferred on him to fulfill his mission. Attacks on his reputation as a strategist and organizer—and the impression that he reigned more than he ruled—constitute only one of the personal sacrifices Eisenhower made in preserving Allied unity. The truth is Eisenhower fits both portrayals.

Any treatment of Smith as a chief of staff must center on Eisenhower— his character, his approach to problem solving and people, and his strengths and weaknesses as a supreme commander. Two aspects of Eisenhower's personality lay at the center of his leadership style: his predilection to disassociate himself from his actions, and his lifelong refusal to engage in personal conflict. Eisenhower proved decisive only when the decision was not to do something. A product of the interwar U.S. Army, Eisenhower's hierarchical and conservative bent explains not only the thinking behind his command decisions but also why he failed to confront the perpetual problems historically faced by the U.S. Army in war: manpower, supply of forces in the field, and civil affairs. Ego, ambition, envy, and suspicion were ubiquitous and occasionally decisive, and Eisenhower's penchant for personalized command produced his biggest headaches. Part of the reason for Eisenhower's successful high-wire act of managing personalities was, of course, the character of the supreme commander, but also vital was the role played by Beetle Smith.

Many years ago Toby Graham offered sage advice. He said nobody would read logistics history unless it was related to operations. Acting on this caveat, the other goal of this book is to make the connection between command decisions and the limitations imposed by logistics broadly defined. Military historians generally ignore logistics—the economics of warfare—in part because it is difficult to research and write about, but mostly because nobody cares about such arcane topics as organizational theories, manpower policies, and the functioning of incredibly complex supply organizations. There are long, densely written discourses on these admittedly not very interesting subjects, but in my view, Materialschlacht— the war for materiel but also for manpower—rests at the core of any explanation of why American forces eventually triumphed in North Africa and northwestern europe, as well as why opportunities for ending the war sooner and at less cost miscarried. The first Allied invasion— operation Torch in northwestern Africa—was nearly postponed or even canceled owing to the near breakdown of American logistics in the United Kingdom during the buildup and mounting phase. Allied efforts in Tunisia initially failed in large part because of the chaos in American supply. A succession of crises in 1944—first fuel and then ammunition and winter clothing, climaxing in the debilitating manpower crunch—left enervated American forces stalemated and vulnerable astride the French-Belgian-German frontiers, giving rise to serious concerns about the war's outcome. Other than Roland Ruppenthal's two-volume official history, Logistical Support of the Armies, and the odd book or article dealing with a particular campaign, there is no major treatment of this crucial aspect of war making covering the span of American participation in europe during World War II. Much of the blame for this operationssupply disconnect rested in Eisenhower's obstinate refusal to alter the headquarters structure. Smith fought and lost numerous battles with Eisenhower over this issue. By examining command decisions through the prism of logistics, a different picture emerges of both Eisenhower as commander and the conduct of operations in North Africa, Italy, and Europe.

Several bromides exist about the roles played by chiefs of staff. Behind every great commander stands his chief of staff. Other than commander, no position in a large, modern bureaucratic military organization is as vital as chief of staff. Chiefs of staff, the linchpins of all military staffs, toil in the shadows, performing the meticulous and anonymous work that wins campaigns. Chiefs of staff translate the will of the commander into practical plans; they harmonize and integrate the actions of headquarters, issuing succinct guidance to their principal staff subordinates while coordinating actions with higher, lateral, and lower staffs. Chiefs of staff must possess not only intelligence and a thorough grasp of detail but also tact and diplomatic skills. Despite the instrumental role played by chiefs of staff, military historians write surprisingly little about them.

Smith discharged all these functions as chief of staff and more. A study of Smith reveals the evolution of the institutional machinery for the higher direction of combined and joint war. If Smith had never served under Eisenhower, he would still command attention for his pivotal role in forging the Combined and Joint Chiefs of Staff apparatuses in Washington in 1942. Enjoying a wide grant of authority from Eisenhower, Smith fashioned and ran Allied headquarters in the Mediterranean and northwestern Europe. Through Smith we observe the inner workings of the complex and rarely smooth relationships among these headquarters and the political heads (Roosevelt, Churchill, and de Gaulle), the uniformed chiefs who stood above (the Combined Chiefs of Staff; the American Joint Chiefs of Staff, principally Marshall; and the British Chiefs of Staff, principally Brooke), and the operational commanders below them (chiefly Alexander and Montgomery for the British and Bradley, Devers, Patton, and Hodges for the Americans). Smith always backstopped Eisenhower in his military decisions and in his dealings with senior American and British politicians and officers. Except when he could not avoid it, Eisenhower delegated to Smith responsibilities for handling Allied and associated entities, most importantly the French. In the absence of direction from above, and exceeding the authority normally vested in a chief of staff, Smith frequently made key policy decisions in areas Eisenhower would not deign to touch, mostly related to military government and civil affairs programs. In effect, Smith acted as the headquarters "general manager" and as Eisenhower's foreign minister; in the latter role he conducted negotiations and signed the surrenders of Italy and Germany.

Higher command in war is a team activity. The commander-chief of staff relationship works best when the two personalities are complementary but not wholly congruent. Although little separated Eisenhower and Smith in terms of their respective professional outlooks and prewar experiences, the two possessed widely divergent personalities. Smith's primary value lay in compensating for Eisenhower's deficiencies. Smith could not play the faceless staff officer because Eisenhower's command style required a proactive chief of staff. If Eisenhower hoped to dodge unpopular decisions and the personal culpability that came with them, if he hoped to evade personal altercations, then as Allied supreme commander, he was in a very strange business. What he needed was a junior partner who was not afraid to go out on a limb, who never avoided a fight, and who at least gave the appearance of having a thick skin. Eisenhower may have stretched the truth when he described Smith as "the best chief of staff ever," but in Beetle he possessed the perfect foil.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from BEETLE by D. K. R. CROSSWELL Copyright © 2010 by The University Press of Kentucky. Excerpted by permission of The University Press of Kentucky. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

Contents

List of Illustrations....................ix
Acknowledgments....................xi
List of Abbreviations....................xv
Introduction....................1
1. Soldier Turned Diplomat....................9
2. Expecting the Worst....................31
3. Dulles's Number Two....................47
4. The Geneva Conference....................71
5. "Ike's Prat Boy"....................95
6. Born to Be a Soldier....................109
7. The Summons to War....................121
8. "They Don't Make 'em Any Better than Smith"....................143
9. "Expunge the Bunk, Complications and Ponderosities"....................163
10. The other Class Stars Fell on....................175
11. "No one ever Graduates"....................191
12. The Chief's Apprentice....................205
13. Forging the Mold....................229
14. "Exceptionally Qualified for Service as Chief of Staff"....................257
15. "Smith Will Save Ike"....................287
16. "We Are on the Threshold of a Magnificent Success"....................313
17. "Thank God You Are in London"....................333
18. "We Shall Continue to Flounder"....................355
19. "Allies Are Very Difficult People to Fight With"....................387
20. The Many Travails of an Allied Chief of Staff....................413
21. The Road to Messina....................441
22. The Italian Job....................469
23. "A Feeling of Restrained Optimism"....................497
24. "We Conduct our Wars in a Most Curious Way"....................525
Part Five: France....................1944
25. The Supreme Command....................551
26. "Enough to Drive You Mad"....................583
27. "It's a Go"....................607
28. Normandy Deadlock....................627
29. What Has the Supreme Command Amounted To?....................667
30. End the War in '44....................695
31. "The Logistical Bottleneck Now Dictates Strategy"....................735
32. Après le Déluge....................771
33. One Desperate Blow....................801
34. Déjà Vu All over Again....................829
35. The German Is a Whipped Enemy....................865
36. Mission Fulfilled....................889
1. Marshall's Reorganized War Department General Staff....................927
2. AFHQ Command and Staff Structure....................928
3. SHAEF Command and Staff Structure....................929
Notes....................931
Sources and Further Reading....................1045
Index....................1053

Editorial Reviews

Walter Bedell Smith (1895–1961), Dwight Eisenhower's chief of staff from 1942 to 1945, remains one of WWII's obscure figures. When he appears, it's usually as Ike's hatchet man, "a one-dimensional SOB." This mammoth, exhaustively researched biography presents instead a master director of the complex machinery of the combined-arms war waged by allied forces. The chief of staff translates the commanding general's will into plan, and plan into action. That requires focused intelligence, mastery of detail, and sophisticated human skills. Smith had them all. Crosswell demonstrates this in an unusual fashion, beginning the book with Smith's distinguished postwar career, culminating as undersecretary of state. He then segues into Smith's development from National Guard private to George Marshall's protégé and secretary, then to the General Staff by 1941. That rise reflected ability rather than affability. But from the first Smith kept British and American egos focused on a common objective. After D-Day he became "a genuine chief of staff," maximizing Eisenhower's strengths while minimizing his proneness to indecision and preference for compromise. Smith was indeed "much more than advertised," and Crosswell brings him out of Eisenhower's shadow. 25 photos; 11 maps. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"There have been countless biographies of the generals of World War II, and many are excellent. This biography of Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower's chief of staff, is one of the best."—Antony Beevor, Wall Street Journal

From the Publisher